Double Drop: Culture-First Leadership + Executive Functioning

This week we have two conversations for the price of one. Dr. Jim Masters is here on the work of leading culture first and Sue Thompson is here on the brain science that either makes that leadership possible or quietly gets in the way. Both are practical. Both will stick.

Grab your coffee. Let’s go.

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Dr. Jim Masters

The Questions That Change School Culture (And They’re Not the Ones You Think)

Culture-First Leadership with Dr. Jim Masters | Sustainable Teaching

There is a version of school leadership that looks right on paper but feels wrong in the hallways. The walkthroughs get done. The PD calendar is full. The evaluation rubrics are current. But teachers are still leaving. Not because they stopped caring, because the building stopped caring about them.

This week, Dr. Jim Masters is here to talk about what happens when you stop leading with compliance and start leading with culture. This is not an aspirational conversation. It is a practical one - led by someone who has done the work and knows what it costs.

The Three Questions That Change Everything

Jim doesn’t start with strategy. He starts with three questions:

• Does your staff feel cared for?

• Do they have a trusted peer or adult to turn to?

• Do they feel valued and part of the school?

These aren’t performance metrics. They’re not measurable by a rubric. But Jim argues they are the foundation everything else sits on, because when teachers don’t feel cared for, the instruction conversation is already lost.

Most leaders skip this part. They jump to data, to walkthroughs, to curriculum alignment. Jim says that is building on a foundation that isn’t there yet. And you will feel it - in turnover, in silence at staff meetings, in the way teachers close their doors and stop asking for help.

The Art of Actually Asking

There is a difference between sending out a Google Form and sitting across from a teacher and saying: What do you love about your job? Where can we grow as a school? What do you need from me?

Jim talks about heart-to-heart conversations - real ones, scheduled ones, where the leader’s only job is to listen. Not to solve. Not to defend. Not to explain why the budget won’t allow it. Just to hear what the person in front of them is actually saying.

And then he adds one question that changes the entire dynamic:

On a scale of 1 to 10, how supported do you feel?

Not how effective. Not how satisfied. How supported. That word matters. Because supported implies someone on the other end doing the supporting and it forces the leader to look in the mirror.

What You Do With What You Hear

This is where most culture work falls apart. Leaders ask. They listen. And then nothing changes.

Jim talks about building a response system that is honest and visible. Track the feedback themes - what are people saying over and over? Document the response actions - what did you actually do? And when you can’t do something, say why. Directly. Without hedging.

The trust doesn’t come from giving teachers everything they want. It comes from closing the loop - so they know their words went somewhere real.

He also talks about follow-up dates. Not “we’ll revisit this later.” Specific dates. Written down. Because culture is not a feeling - it is a set of commitments you either keep or you don’t.

Start Small, Start Now

Jim is honest about the fact that some culture problems take years to fix. But he also believes in quick wins, the things you can do this week that signal to your staff: I heard you.

Maybe it is adjusting the meeting schedule. Maybe it is showing up to a grade-level planning session without an agenda. Maybe it is writing a handwritten note to three teachers and meaning every word.

The long-term work matters. The budget asks, the structural shifts, the policy changes. But the quick wins are what buy you the trust to do the long-term work.

Free Resource: The Culture-First Leadership Framework

[Download The Culture-First Leadership Framework]

Build trust and transform your school culture - one real conversation at a time.

This four-section framework walks you through:

• The Three Critical Questions: the starting point for every culture conversation with your staff

• Heart-to-Heart Conversation Starters: exactly what to ask and how to open the door

• Data Collection & Tracking: how to capture what you hear and turn it into action

• Action Response Planning: quick wins, long-term commitments, and honest explanations when the answer is no

The gut check:

When was the last time you sat down with a teacher on your team and simply asked, “How is it going and what do you need from me?” Not during an evaluation. Not in a hallway. A real conversation with no agenda except listening.

Your action this week: Schedule 15-minute one-on-ones with three staff members. Ask the conversation starters. Listen. Take notes. Follow up within 48 hours with one specific action.

Sue Thompson

Your brain’s scratch pad is full. That’s the whole problem.

Executive Functioning for Educators with Sue Thompson | Sustainable Teaching

A third grade teacher wrote in last month. Her student is bright, sharp, curious. And every morning when she gives a task, he freezes. Not defiance. Not confusion. He just can’t get started.

If you’ve been in a classroom any amount of time, you know this kid. Sometimes you’ve been this kid at 3pm on a Thursday when you have forty-two things to do and no idea which one to touch first.

That’s executive functioning. It’s why I pulled Sue Thompson into the studio this week.

Sue has spent twenty years in elementary and middle school classrooms - 1st through 8th, currently supporting grades 5–8. She teaches instructional technology. She also teaches something that doesn’t show up on a certification: how to help a kid (or an adult) whose brain has too many tabs open to start the day.

Here’s what we got into.

The three things your brain is actually doing

Sue frames executive functioning in three moves.

• Working memory is the mental scratch pad. It’s where you hold a direction while you try to execute it. It is smaller than any of us want it to be. The move for teachers: one question at a time. Chunk the directions. Have kids say them back to you before they start. Not because they weren’t listening. Because the scratch pad filled up and they lost line two.

• Cognitive flexibility is shifting. A kid who has built her morning around independent reading time cannot pivot on a dime because you decided today is a fire drill day. The move: visual schedules on the wall. Clear communication before you pivot. Model the pivot — say out loud what you’re doing and why. The less a kid has to guess, the more brain they have left for the actual work.

• Inhibitory control is stopping the impulse before it becomes a behavior. This is the one everyone reaches for first because it’s the one that shows up as misbehavior. Wait time. Structured breaks. Brain breaks tied to what the class just did, not random dance parties. The body needs to discharge something before the brain can reset.

None of this is a new framework. What Sue does differently is she refuses to stop at the kid. She applies the same three to you.

What batch work actually looks like

Sue’s rule: group the same kind of work together. One copy session a day. One video recording session a week. Email checked once, at a fixed time, not every time your phone buzzes.

If you are reading this and your first thought is “that sounds nice but I don’t have time,” I want you to notice something. The reason you don’t have time is often because you are context-switching thirty times before lunch. Batching is what gives you the time.

She pairs it with two more.

The 3+1 system: three priorities today, plus one bonus if everything else holds. Not nine. Three. The overwhelm isn’t that you have a lot to do. The overwhelm is that you can’t tell which one to start on. Pick three. Do three. If the fourth happens, it’s a gift.

The 2-minute rule: if it takes less than two minutes, do it now. Do not write it down. Do not put it in the queue. The queue is for real things. The reply-all acknowledgment and the permission slip check-off are not real things.

This is not productivity theater. This is protecting the scratch pad.

The folders, the Friday, and the den

For students, Sue is a systems designer.

• VIP and WIP folders: Very Important Papers and Work In Progress. Two folders, color-coded, non-negotiable. Designated organization time every morning. Papers live in one of two places. Not on the desk. Not in the backpack abyss.

• Tidy Friday: three minutes. Every Friday. Clean out both folders. Sue’s only rule: “When in doubt, don’t throw it out.” Because a seven-year-old’s definition of “I need this” is not the same as yours, and the point is not clean folders. The point is that the kid practices the sorting.

• Team captains at each table: not bosses, not monitors. Checkers. They run a morning checklist. Is the chair pushed in. Are the supplies in the bin. Did everyone sharpen a pencil. Same items. Same every day. It turns the start of the morning from a thirty-kid free-for-all into a routine that runs itself.

And for the kid who freezes - the bright one who can’t start - Sue builds what she calls a den. A small, visually bounded workspace. A visual schedule on the wall next to it. A question-mark card the kid can flip up to say “I am stuck” without having to find the words. A turn bin for finished work. Pictures, not words, on the cue cards, because the reading load is part of the freeze.

The whole design protects one thing: the kid’s ability to self-identify being stuck. Once the kid can tell you, you can help. Before that, you’re both guessing.

What about the kindergarten teacher whose room is a paper storm

That question came in too. Backpacks dumping. Papers everywhere. Every day feels like a start-over.

Sue’s answer is the same answer, scaled down: VIP/WIP folders, Tidy Friday, team captains with picture checklists. The age doesn’t change the structure. It changes the input modality. Five-year-olds don’t read a checklist. They match a picture. Same system. Different surface.

Why this is actually about you

I’ll be honest. I came into this episode expecting strategies for students. I left with a list of things to change about how I run my own week.

The point Sue kept coming back to: executive functioning isn’t a kid problem. It’s a human problem that adults have had more time to build scaffolding around. When you give a kid a VIP folder, you are not teaching them to be organized. You are giving them the scaffolding you already built for yourself, earlier. When you batch your own work, you are doing the exact thing you’re asking them to do.

If you teach this, you live it. If you live it, you teach it better. That’s the whole loop.

If this is the thing you’ve been quietly drowning in for a while, Sue has a full course on executive functioning over in the TDI Learning Hub. It’s the long version of what we covered today - specific routines, scripts, and templates you can take into class Monday. Use code Thompson for 20% off through the end of April.

Find Sue on LinkedIn as Sue E. Thompson. Her blog in the TDI Creator Studio is where she works most of this out in writing, and it’s a good thing to have in your inbox.

See you next week.

Rae